One of the most enduring myths to emerge from the era of Abraham Lincoln is the notion that the South fought the Civil War not to defend slavery, but to uphold the rights of states against a tyrannical central government. This myth was extremely important to the white South’s resistance to post-war Reconstruction, particular the effort by northern Republicans to secure basic civil rights and liberties for newly freed slaves. This states’ rights doctrine took concrete form during Reconstruction in the enactment of black codes by Southern states that sharply limited the freedom of African Americans.

The doctrine of states’ rights had the backing of Lincoln’s successor President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. Johnson opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 because it allegedly represented a “stride toward centralization and the concentration of all legislative power in the national government.” He also privately wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

After the “redemption” of Southern states by white supremacists in the 1870s, states’ rights continued to serve as an effective shield against federal efforts to end segregation and discrimination against African Americans—known as the Jim Crow system in the South. Even after the rise of a liberal Democratic Party in the 1930s, that expanded the power of the federal government, states’ rights continued to serve as a means for protecting Jim Crow. In an unwritten compact between northern and southern Democrats, President Franklin Roosevelt and his allies let Jim Crow rule below the Mason-Dixon Line. In turn, white Southerners backed the New Deal and delivered their bloc votes to Democrats.

Under President Harry S. Truman in 1948, for the first time, Democrats broke this compact by embracing an ambitious civil rights program. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford told Truman not to worry about “difficulty with our Southern friends,” because “it takes a considerable number of southern States to equal the importance of such States as New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois,” where the black vote loomed large. Georgia Senator Richard Russell, their tacit leader of Southern Democrats, warned against tampering with “States’ rights and white supremacy,” the basis of “Southern devotion to the Democratic Party.” A “federal Gestapo,” he said, was poised to deploy “every power of the Federal Government…to destroy segregation and compel intermingling and miscegenation of the races in the South.”

After the Democratic convention, some Southern Democrats formed their own political party and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. The dissidents named their new organization the “States’ Rights Party,” although to Thurmond’s chagrin the pressed dubbed it the “Dixiecrat” party. Thurmond campaigned on the issue of states’ rights, although he admitted that his real purpose was to defend “the racial integrity and purity of the White and Negro races.” Thurmond’s appeal did not extend beyond the South. He won 2.4 percent of the popular vote and electoral votes from four Deep South states. His campaign foreshadowed the later decline of the Democratic Party in the south. Southern Democrats continued to invoke states’ rights in their opposition to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed legal segregation in the South and to the civil rights laws of the 1960s.

The states’ rights doctrine has no foundation in the era of Abraham Lincoln. The south seceded from the Union and fought the Civil War, not to uphold states’ rights, but to defend slavery. The South seceded before the new Republican government of Abraham Lincoln took any action to restrict slavery in the south or any other institutions of Southern states. Secession began well before Lincoln took the oath of office, which took place on March 4, following the election year, not January 20. On December 20, 1860, delegates attending a secession convention in South Carolina voted for the “dissolution of the union between the state of South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America.”

By February of 1861, six other Southern states had followed South Carolina to secession. So agitated were the passions in the South that by inauguration eve Lincoln’s advisers had the carriage bearing the new president steal into the Capital at midnight. Lincoln’s declaration that he would not interfere with the rights of states to manage their race relations had no impact in the South. However, in his July 1861 message to Congress Lincoln decisively rejected the idea that the Union was a dissolvable compact of states. “A power to destroy the government itself,” is not a power reserved to the states.

The ultimate refutation of the notion that the Confederacy stood for states’ rights is found in the Constitution of the so-called Confederate States of America. This Constitution did not reserve for the states the power to accept or reject slavery, supposedly the basis of secession and war. Rather, in effect, it prohibited its states from interfering with slavery. For states within the Confederacy, the Constitution declared, “citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.” (Emphasis added.) The Constitution also mandated that, “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.“ In addition, the Constitution included a Supremacy Clause modeled on the U.S. Constitution declaring that laws and treaties of the Confederate government “shall be the supreme law of the land.”

It is long past time to put to rest the myth that secession and the Civil War turned on states’ rights and to recognize the contradiction at the heart of the Confederacy’s approach to this issue. Within a federal system, certain powers and responsibilities are delegated to the states, but not at the expense of people’s rights and liberties. We would do well to heed the words of President Lincoln in an 1862 speech, “May our children and our children’s children to a thousand generations, continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by a united country, and have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions bequeathed us by Washington and his compeers.”